How the Government Response to Covid-19 is Used to Harm People

This post has a lot of words, and a lot of citations. If you want the gist, or tl;dr, just watch the video from JP at the very bottom. He hits many of my points in a much more entertaining manner. But if you want more detail and dozens of citations, please keep reading!

The government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic has never had the goal to minimize death or suffering from the disease. Instead, the US government response to the pandemic has the explicit goal of benefitting the ultra-wealthy, destroying the middle class, reducing freedom and advancing agendas towards total surveillanceand implementing a police state. The virus was used as an excuse to advance an existing agenda that can be traced back to 1992 in the United States.

That's a pretty significant statement that I am sure sounds incredulous at first and I hope to use this moment to show why I think it is supported in fact. Because of that, this post is going to be longer than most of what I've written. Grab a comfy seat and a beverage and let's dive in!

Starting a year ago, when most people first heard about Covid-19, I thought it sounded fishy. At that time, I didn't have any real information on it save what was coming out of China on leaked video, and I'm a skeptic by nature, so I took time to absorb information as it became available rather than assume news reports were accurate. In general I'm skeptical of anything I see on the news, so often they are spun so much that the telling of a story on the news barely resembles the event that actually happened. The more I read the more I realized the US government response to the virus was doing more harm than the virus itself and many US citizens are only supportive of those actions because of constant propaganda.

So I'll start with discussing that propaganda. You may or may not realize that in 2014 Obama ended the restriction that prevented the federal government from engaging in propaganda by repealing the Smith-Mundt act as part of the defense reauthorization bill. This opened the door for federal agendas to be injected into general advertising, TV shows, sports programming and social media. The year after Smith-Mundt was repealed the federal government spent $56 million on propaganda, which in the budget is called "Information Campaigns". Each year since then that amount spent has increased exponentially. The US government spent 1.5 billion in 2017 in propaganda, up from 900 million in 2015. This year isn't over, but it looks like the amount spent on propaganda is going to be several times the amount spent in 2017. Once that door was opened it's increased a huge amount every year.
And it's not just the US, take the UK- the British government has become one of the largest advertisers in the country. Our government spends billions of dollars a year on propaganda.

Consider spending, the US spent a total of 1.62 Trillion up until December on their covid response. Add to that the 900 Billion December Stimulus and the total comes to over 2.5 trillion, and very little of that went to actually help people or battle the virus. The pandemic and the resulting stimulus bills were used to funnel money to billionaires and the most powerful corporations, while the small independent businesses were punished with shutdowns. In fact, in 2020 alone the Federal Reserve created 35% of all the dollars in total circulation according to the M1 report they publish. This means that as many dollars were created in 2020 as were created the entire 40 years between 1975 and 2015. That's going to usher in huge inflation. Inflation hurts the poor and middle class much more than the wealthy- in fact often times the wealthy benefit greatly from inflation.

Let's look at that first stimulus bill passed back in the spring, the CARES act. Only 100 billion for hospitals and medical facilities. Does that seems odd to you? $500 billion was set aside for large corporations, but only a fifth of that to all health care services. Also- in a seperate action the federal government gave out a trillion in interest free loans to huge banks. Did Walmart and Amazon and JP Morgan Chase need to be given taxpayer money? They are all having record profits this year, along with many other huge companies. McDonalds is doing great while your local restaurant isn't allowed to have indoor seating. The stimulus made the rich richer and was completely ineffective at helping regular people or stopping the spread of the virus. Out of 2.2 Trillion hospitals and health care facilities only got 100 billion earmarked! I know I keep repeating that, but it's really one of the core issues here. Health care only recieved double what went to pay off student loans for people, which got 43.7 billion. The CARES act wasn't about a pandemic, it was used to pay off people who got congress elected. It's shameful. If you want to look over a nice info graphic describing where the money went, this one is pretty good.

On top of that, some of the largest banks in the country decided they could make a quick buck illegally by taking advantage of the hastily written stimulus. JP Morgan Chase is being sued over misconduct involving stimulus funds and that's just one of many legal challenges against financial institutions for misconduct. Even the financial journals have said that workers just weren't benefitted by the money that was given to companies in the stimulus. While big business thrived and used the money to buy back stock to make their shareholders and boards even more wealthy, the state and local governments starting forcing restrictions on small businesses.

Let's talk about all these restrictions next starting with one of the most obvious- mask mandates. Most states have mask mandates. Do mask mandates make us safer? Do states that have mask mandates have less infections or deaths than those that don't? No. The numbers don't back that up. In fact, New York City, one of the regions with the most draconian lock down measures has the worst death rate by far. New York City counts for 8 percent of covid deaths for the whole United States, while it is only 2.5% of the population. On average three times as many people are dying there than the rest of the country. They are obviously doing something wrong with their approach of lockdowns, mask mandates and other restrictions. Let's take a moment to look at one of those restrictions- closing all restaurant dining rooms. By their own statistics, only 1% of covid cases in NYC come from restaurants. Closing them isn't a rational way to reduce infections, so we have to instead ponder what the real goal of that is. It's not based in math or science as an effective way to prevent the spread of a virus.

I decided to look more local for mask related data. I live in a state that doesn't have a mask mandate but several counties in that state have mask mandates and other restrictions. I'm going to look at St Louis County, where I live, and two neighboring counties- Jefferson County and St Charles County. St Louis County has had heavy restrictions in place since the spring which includes mask mandates, significant restrictions on dining and reduced hours mandated for many stores and restaurants. St Charles and Jefferson Counties, which border St Louis County, have had no mask mandate until just a couple weeks ago and no or much fewer restrictions on businesses. As well, the recently pushed mask mandate in those two counties has been widely ignored. I play hockey in St Charles County and mask compliance at the rink and the nearby bar and grill we visit for a beer after games is maybe 20%. I am a member of a shooting range in Jefferson County and 2 out of 3 visits since they mask mandate the employees are the only people wearing masks. In St Louis County the mask mandate is widely adhered to by citizens and visitors. When I skate at the rink in St Louis county the employees will actively harass anyone who isn't masked up. The approaches of the counties are radically different.

How has that disparity in approach effected the infection and mortality rates? If we believe the propaganda then the counties without mask mandates and restrictions should be just full of dead and infected people. Yet, we see that isn't the case. See this chart for details, which is the best information as of December 14th, when I gathered this information. All data was taken from USA Facts website for consistency in reporting. Different sources show different numbers, but the ratio between sources was the same on the data sources I checked.

Area	Total Pop	Covid Case	Infections/100k	Deaths	Deaths/100k
St Louis County	994205	53282	5359	1082	109
St Charles County	402022	23619	5875	234	58
Jefferson County	225081	13119	5829	113	50

So what do we see, percentage-wise? Both St Charles and Jefferson Counties average a little bit higher when it comes to reported infections than St Louis County- 5.8 and 5.9k per 100k people vs 5.4k in St Louis County. That's indeed an increase, but not a terribly large one. If we then look to death rate however, we see a very significant disparity. St Louis County has double the death rate of the other two counties. But even St Louis County pales in comparison to NYC, which comes in at 296 deaths per 100k citizens, more than 5 times St Charles and Jefferson Counties and almost triple the St Louis County average. At least in this analysis, mask mandates and lockdowns don't make people safer. I've seen other people do similar work and it always comes out the same- places with mask mandates don't have any better outcomes than those that don't.

There is no positive correlation between mask mandates and health outcomes, despite the constant stream of propaganda telling you otherwise. In fact, there seems to be a negative correlation- the areas with the highest death rates are areas that have mask mandates. Masks are not helping and it's very probable they are hurting. Even Fauci famously said at the beginning that people shouldn't wear masks. Actually, every media outlet I found in March said to not wear masks. As well, Fauci was part of a study in 2008 that showed that bacterial pnuemonia killed more people than the flu during the Spanish Flu pandemic, primarily from improper hygene regarding face coverings. Everyone I see is wearing masks improperly and is likely putting their health at risk due to that behavior. Fauci knows that masks aren't improving health outcomes. Why are masks pushed so hard then?

Improper mask wearing makes people sick as shown in that 2008 report, and more people that feel unwell keeps people afraid. Mask wearing also dehumanizes people. It creates an issue in which people who support masks think less of people who don't. It creates and "us" and "them" wedge in communities and families. There are even scores of instances in the US where people who weren't wearing masks were attacked by people who support mask wearing. It's become a huge issue to disagree on, which keeps people distracted from the broader effects of government policy. Wearing a mask shows support for the government propaganda machine, it makes the wearer an evangalist for the government approach. It demonstrates to the people pushing these mandates that people are willing to be compliant with anything they say, regardless of the science or outcome. And it just starts with masks- what else does that government response include other than mandatory mask wearing?

• Social Distancing - a newly created term to discourage human contact

• Closing playgrounds while leaving liquor stores open

• Telling churches they can only seat 25% of their capacity or closing access altogether while allowing Walmart to be packed

• Keeping children out of libraries but leaving casinos open to operate

• Closing gyms but leaving fast food drive throughs open

• They kicked kids out of college, instead of allowing them to develop herd immunity as suggested by docotors.

• Demanding stores reduce their hours, which increases shopper density while they are open

• Choosing winners and losers in who gets to stay open and who doesn't, sometimes even targeting political rivals

• Pushing Contact Tracing, which will be used for predictive policing and social credit scores.

• Promoting the idea of a health passport which will decide who can take the bus, get on a plane, buy groceries or go to work.

• Stopping live music, art and any celebratory festival, like weddings and retirement parties.

• It's increased the violent crime rate in many cities due to all the forced unemployment.

• Has doubled incidents of hunger and starvation in the world and cause more people to starve than die of the virus. Even in my local area, people are going hungry

Those fighting hunger say they’ve never seen anything like this in America, even during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The organization has seen a 60 percent average increase in food bank users during the pandemic: about 4 in 10 are first-timers. As well, the Salvation Army says requests for assistance have tripled. People are really hurting right now, not due to the virus, but due to the lockdowns and other restrictions. The response to the virus is doing more harm than the virus itself. It's hitting children especially hard.

People who wear masks show their support for these policies, whether they realize or not. They show their compliance at the least and their enthusiastic support at the worst. People who promote mask wearing are complicit in spreading these policies, policies that do obvious harm to other humans. They become a part of that propaganda machine through social pressure. That's my primary issue with mask mandates. If someone freely chooses to wear a mask that's completely different. People over 75 are at a much higher risk than other people and it's perfectly reasonable that they would choose to be more cautious. Convincing children they have to stay 6 feet away from their friends and wear a mask or they are going to kill grandma is evil and qualifies as child abuse, yet we see the news, government announcements, schools and even parents pushing that narrative constantly. Just look at what children are being taught today, it's horrifying.

That constant messaging is the core of the government driven propaganda I mentioned earlier. It's omnipresent, like the hand of God or Big Brother from that well known dystopian novel. You can't escape it- it's on billboards, news shows and websites, in commentary by radio shock jocks, public service anouncements by sportsball players and everywhere on social media. It's been a message repeated every 5 minutes for 9 months on every possible avenue. The messaging is way over the top. An education campaign can stop once the message is out. Propaganda requires constant reinforcement to convince people to believe things that aren't true. This is solidly in the propaganda camp. And it's been effective! Just think how many people you know who live in constant fear. People who are afraid to go in public, to visit with family, or do normal every day activities they weren't afraid to do in 2018, even though the 2018 flu season was just as bad for deaths as 'rona. The danger hasn't changed but the messaging has. It's never been safer to be a human, but overall people have never been more afraid. The onslought of constant propaganda on this virus has leveraged that trend to the detriment of humanity.

Let me reiterate the point made in the last few paragraphs, since it's one of the core tenants of this post. The government response to the virus benefits the ultra wealthy and the largest companies, while it hurts the working class and small businesses, closes gyms, libraries, playgrounds, churches, art, denies human contact, music and will starve millions of people, mostly children, due to shutting down the economy. When a person wears a mask because they are afraid of a virus that is killing almost no one, they are showing their support for these policies even if they don't realize it. It's like wearing a t-shirt of your favorite team or rock band- it shows to the world your support. Certainly some people have died, and it's terrible tragic for those people and their families, but overall the world isn't experiencing a statistically significant amount of additional deaths.

Which is why I stated covid was "killing almost no one"? It's not me that is asserting that in a vacuum, that's supported by CDC stats that are captured in a report from John Hopkins. That report was removed from the website several days later because it didn't jive with the propaganda being pushed. However, anyone has the ability to download data from the CDC database and do their own analysis. I did, and it matched what I saw in that report. Not only that, the John Hopkins version has been scrubbed from the internet- you can't find it anywhere unless youcan find someone who grabbed a copy and it doesn't come up in searches. It's been intentially hidden from people.

As well, we see people being afraid to go to the doctor due to the fear campaign, even for heart attacks and cancer. Not treating a heart attack or cancer in a timely fashion is going to greatly impact mortality rates in the future. Lastly on the health front, lockdowns have resulted in incredibly high numbers of shut businesses which greatly increases the number of people living in poverty. The link between poor health and poverty is very well documented. Poverty strips years of life from people.

The effects on pollution are stark as well. You can't go to a restaurant and use a reusable plate and silverware, you get take-away with foam containers and plastic forks. You can't just use a condiment container- it has to be transfered to a tiny container for you. Rather than going shopping and picking up goods once a week people are getting deliveries of single items from Amazon every day. Think of the packaging and the fuel costs of having everything delivered one item at a time, it's tremendous. My city is having a hard time keeping up with all the extra trash. Single use face masks have become a huge trash problem in nature and the ocean, gloves, hand sanitizer bottles all add up. People can't use reusable bags at the grocers, we have to use single use bags. Restaurants are standing up tents and heating them at an additional cost of fuel. The ability to live a sustainable lifestyle has been impacted.

I've mentioned many of the ways the government approach has had a negative outcome, but there are so many more. Drug overdoses are way up this year. Depression and suicides are spiking. More people died from suicide in Japan in October than have died in total from covid and it's hit women the hardest. Global poverty has risen for the first time in 20 years. The more you look the worse it gets. These are real world examples of harm and suffering being perpetrated based on a fear response to all this propaganda.

Information being deleted and / or not allowed on platforms because it doesn't match the government approved message is an increasingly large problem. It's the very definition of censorship. Information that deflects from the "official" stance isn't allowed on FCC controlled airwaves. It's deleted from social media. It's not searchable in Google. If you share an article from a medical doctor that doesn't support the CDC stance Facebook will delete it and ban your user account. If you post a video on YouTube about anything health related you get a warning to read about covid at the CDC. If you post something challenging the offical stance of the CDC or the WHO the video gets deleted and the poster gets a community strike which can lead to a ban. Sometimes even if you post an article directly from the WHO it gets deleted if it doesn't support the CDC stance, such as the stance of the WHO to end lockdowns.

That's why I am so comfortable referring to the persistent government and media messaging as propaganda. Not only does the messaging to be afraid and wear a mask permeate every bit of media, no one is allowed to present any other view point on any major media platform. The control over information is near total. To get any sort of information that isn't in line with the CDC you have to go looking for it on alternative platforms. If you read an article in a medical journal that says the best defence against covid is to strengthen your immune system and get a lot of exercise, then try to search for it later you'll never find it again due to search engine algorithm weighting. Search results that don't fit the propaganda are being hidden. If the messaging from the CDC was accurate and helpful they wouldn't have to cram it down our throats and destroy any dissent. This is a psychological operation.

I am labelling it a psychological operation without anything to support that? Again, no- a person I know who has been involved in PsyOps for the US military in other countries identified it as such. It's a playbook PsyOp as run today by our military, only now it's being run by newscasters and social media tycoons. The constant messaging is working to convince people of "facts" that aren't true at all. If you tell people something enough, it will start to stick. Well, unless you are blessed with defiant genes like me- the more I hear something the less I think it's true. Truth speaks for itself, it doesn't have to be beat into someone's head. The more you try to force something on me the more I supect ill intentions. It's a fear campaign at the core.

When I say **fear campaign ** perpetrated by the media, I mean exactly that. I tracked my local news for a few weeks and they lead with the worst possible spin every day. This isn't new, heck, way back in the 80's it was the focus of a Don Henley song. But with this pandemic it seems particularly eggregious. If day to day infections are down, they run with the 7 day rolling average of infections if that number is higher. If the 7 day rolling average of deaths are down, but there are more infections then that gets the headline. If every running statistic is down, like it was the week after Thanksgiving, they lead with stories from weeks earlier about random people who died. Remember when all the talking heads and health officials talked about Thanksgiving being a super spreader event? The week after Thanksgiving was one of the lowest weeks of the fall for infections. That part doesn't get reported. Every day you think this is getting worse, when it's not. It's pushing constant fear.

This is how it looks in practice. Let's say we have a week that looks like this:

Day	Infections	Deaths
Friday	200	1
Saturday	120	2
Sunday	140	2
Monday	180	1
Tuesday	140	1

On Saturday the corona headline would be "Deaths Spike! Deaths Double in One Day"
Sunday would read "Infection rate up more than 10%"
Monday's headline would show "Infection rates up double digits for second day"
Tuesday would say "A Couple Married for 85 years dies hours apart from deadly coronavirus" because all the metrics are down.

Notice that the trend over those 5 days is steadily lower, but every day has people panicked thinking it's constantly getting worse. They've been doing this for 9 months now! It has a long term effect on the psyche and morale of the people who watch or read the news. It impairs our ability to see the good side, to see things improving because we are fed this negativity every day. It impairs our ability to make rational choices. Persistent negativity is also damaging to physical health and resilience.

So who is behind all this propaganda? Why would someone want to do that? Most people can't imagine anyone who would actually do something like that. Luckily, the answer has never been more obvious- it's driven by the institutions controlled by the billionaires of the world. The elite 1% of the 1% richest in the world. The people who used to be kings and queens and are know CEO's and oligarchs. The people who control the UN, the WHO and the World Economic Forum (WEF). The people who own our politicians by giving them the millions they need to get elected. They have never been more obvious in their intent. This particular story in the US starts with George Bush senior and his well known 1990 speach where he spoke of the upcoming New World Order. Two years after that, Bush signed onto Agenda 21 along with many other nations. Agenda 21 was first made public at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in South America in 1992 and was later renamed to The Commission on Sustainable Development. And fun fact!- if you search "Agenda 21" on Google the only results point to the new name (CSD) or articles talking about how Agenda 21 is just a conspiracy theory, despite it being published in the official minutes at the UN conference and widely available to read. Even though it's been in existence for two decades, most major news organizations have articles labeling it a conspiracy theory. Last year Facebook was even banning people for discussing it.

Over the time, Agenda 21 has been rebranded several times, but the core precepts remain the same. Today those goals are captured under the "Great Reset" section on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website. I recommend you take some time to read it! It involves many hours of reading to fully absorb, but some of the highlights are:
No one owns anything- things are delivered in a "just in time" model for usage, then they are returned to the depot.
You don't have property rights or your own home- the space you sleep in is reused when you aren't present. Every space will be a multi-use space.
Everyone lives in smart cities where there is no privacy.
No one lives in rural areas, which are set aside as nature reserves for use only by the ruling class.
Food is highly controlled and people are only allowed low protein diets of GMO food.

Most importantly, the WEF is very forthcoming with these goals and are very open about them seeing this pandemic as an opportunity to advance their agenda. But again, if you read articles about the Great Reset on the BBC or New York Times or CNN or hundreds of other news sources it gets labeled a conspiracy theory. But if you go to the WEF website I linked above everything is laid out plain to see, with plenty of graphics and videos and world leaders giving speeches. It's just bizarre how so many media outlets deny the information exists. It really shows how modern media companies have just become propaganda machines that only parrot messages allowed by governments and billionaires. It's not surprising, since almost all the news companies in America are owned by just 15 billionaires.

I want to look next at the approach to the shutdowns. So many of the shutdown actions didn't make any sense if you look at it from a clinical standpoint. If you want to slow the spread then the best approach is to give people a chance to spread out. Allow stores to expand their hours which reduces shopper density. If 1,000 shoppers a day visit the local grocers and they are open 20 hours then you're going to average 50 people an hour. If you drop that to 10 hours you are doubling the number of people in the store at any given time. That's exactly what my town did, though- they took the very action to help spread a virus.

It doesn't stop there, of course. They also blocked people from dining in many restaurants which resulted in widespread unemployment. The last week I worked downtown it was a ghost town at lunch and it got worse after that with many restaurants closing. In fact, most restaurants effected by closures will never open again. Demanding restaurants close takes the number of people who normally eat out and puts them in the grocery store more often- that very grocery store that is now forced to close early due to government mandate. My grocery store went from being open 24 hours to being forced to close at 8p, as well as having to carry the extra load of people who couldn't go to restaurants. Both moves increased the chance the virus would pass.

There are several ways this is class warfare. I've already spoken to how this benefits the rich and hurts the middle class, but there's more to it. Most of the restaurants that were told they needed to close for two weeks back in the spring are permanently out of business now. Those places will be replaced by chains run by mega corporations when they are allowed to reopen. The government demands have also created a new underclass that is required to wear masks, like service workers. It's really disconcerting to see everyone who works a service forced to wear a mask, like in a restaurant or a golf course, while the customers go unmasked. In a blink these restrictions set up a caste system and it's disgusting. As well, we have decreed certain workers as "essential workers". Who is essential changes slightly from region to region, but again it's suddenly created a new class of citizen- the non-essential worker. How does it feel to be called non-essential? It's divisive and creates categories to seperate people. When you categorize people you sow division. On top of that, any person who works to provide for themself and their family is an essential worker and calling them anything but is degrading.

I've also noticed that many places have closed their bathrooms to the public. They are literally impeding the ability to wash our hands. The ice rink I skate at in St Louis County does this- I literally cannot wash my hands before or after a scrimmage or pick up game. Same goes for the ice cream place around the corner and dozens of other stores I've seen. That does the opposite of keeping people safe- it's preventing them from engaging in safe hygene. Instead there is hand sanitizer at the front desk, so everyone can travel to the same spot to smear goo on their hands rather than allow them to use the multiple sinks most places have. On the topic of hand sanitizer, it's well known that frequent use has resulted in resistant bacteria that are harder to kill through normal means. It can even create super bugs It's use should be discouraged, but instead it's become a ritual that is encouraged. It's yet another unhealthy outcome that puts people at risk.

All of these measures were forced onto the populace under false pretenses. The CDC has stated that Covid-19 will be here for the long haul, which is completely expected with a new virus. Any medical professional or person familiar with virulogy would realize that. However- people were asked to "Shut down for 2 weeks to slow the spread", or "Lockdown now to flatten the curve". How many times were we all told that? Hundreds? Thousands? That intent was never geniune. The pandemic task forces always knew that restrictions wouldn't achieve anything unless they went on in perpetuity, which is the real plan. However, misleading the public achieved two things- it prevented people from resisting and it helped drain the savings of small businesses who thought they would get to re-open after a few weeks.

If a mayor or governor or even the president said we had to accept restrictions for the next 5 years people would have resisted. If you told a restaurant owner they couldn't seat people to capacity for 5 years then they could have closed up shop and taken up other employment before they spent all their savings. By constantly stringing people along, so many small business owners have exhausted any reserves they had, which not only means they go out of business, it means they don't have the capital to start up a new business. It was a willful act by the powerful to ruin the middle class business owner. That's class warfare. It's not about keeping people safe, the US has only 4% of the world's population and 25% of the covid infections and 20% of the deaths. Either our government's approach is creating more harm or the numbers reported by the CDC are inflated to spread fear.

Why do I say 5 years? I think that is how long it will take people to get fed up enough to take to the streets and end this, because that's the only way this ends. Once the powerful get more power, they do not willingly or easily give it up. Either people resist, or we slowly get more and more rights taken away little by little. Bill Gates recently said that "If everyone takes the vaccine and sticks to the lockdowns, we could open up the economy in 12-18 months.". So if everyone gets the vaccine, which we already know won't happen, and everyone plays along with another year of lockdowns we may be able to return to normal by the summer of 2022. That's another year of no weddings, no music, no art, no graduation ceromonies, being constantly afraid you are going to infect an old person and maybe, just maybe they'll let us have our lives back. That's the highest level of oppression I've ever witnessed in this country.

Oh, but even if you take the vaccine you have to keep wearing masks and social distance and have lockdowns In fact, if you take the vaccine you can still spread the virus.

But wait! Already they've found a new strain in the UK! Well, that's going to complicate things. That'll add 6 months on at least. And a year from now it will be something else, and a year after that something else until we realize we've been living in fear like caged animals for half a decade. That's the end game of all of this- to push as many societies as close to the goals in the Great Reset as possible. Lockdowns and restrictions were never about keeping people safe- we've been fed all that through false pretenses. A crisis was amplified and used to enact goals that have been widely held and clearly documented for almost 30 years. The approach has been to slowly boil the frog rather than be upfront about mutli-year restrictions with the end goal of destroying the middle class.

It's not just me seeing this creeping authoritarianism. The CATO institute rates countries in it's Human Freedom Index and this year the US has dropped two places. Or read this report that states "The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dire impact on civic freedoms globally," We are getting authoritarian at a faster rate than the rest of the world. All countries have to deal with covid, we are doing it in a more heavy handed way than the rest of the world and it's resulting in more virus deaths and all the other harm I've laid out here. Why do you think that is? Who does that benefit? Hopefully you have a better idea after reviewing what I've presented here.

The billionaires of the world have convinced people through constant propaganda to act against their own self interest by using guilt to convince people if they aren't compliant with all these restrictions they are harming others. The reality is directly opposite, being compliant with the government response to 'rona is doing exponentially more harm than the virus, and many of the harms will be generational.

From the beginning the media response to the virus smelled to me just like the response to 9-11. We were told we have to think of our neighbor and accept restrictions to keep people safe. As we can see in retrospect to 9-11, it was used to launch a stripping of freedoms, create two new permanent authoritarian government agencies and two decades of non-stop war in the middle east that has done nothing but resulted in death of Americans and other people which has exceeded 800,000 humans, as well as a destatbalization of a dozen countries resulting in famine and poverty. We are no safer today than before 9-11, but we've racked up in trillions in debt, destroyed the environment, accepted intrusions by the TSA and DHS and killed hundreds of thousands of people while making the richest people in the world richer. The lockdowns and other restrictions and mandates are going to have a similar outcome.

What can we do to resist this? What's a rational approach? First we need to feed our immune system. This is the best source I've seen concatenating various studies regarding vitamin D, if you don't follow any of these other links I strongly recommend you absorb this one. Get sun, get exercise, take zinc and vitamin D, eat healthy. Stop watching the news, which gives them revenue to profit from their model of fear. Stop using social media platforms that censor free speech like Facebook and YouTube, as every click, every page view they get gives them money. Resist contact tracing apps and mask mandates. Write your legislators. Participate in demonstrations. Support the people around you. Teach your children that human contact is important. There is a resistance, it's just not being shown on the news or when it is, it's demonized.

One of the best things I've read this year states "Did you ever wonder what you'd do during the Civil Rights Movement, Slavery or the Holocost? You're doing it now.". I used to wonder how Germany could do such terrible things during world war 2, or how tens of millions could be starved in Russia in the years after that- it was propaganda that created division, made people make choices based on fear rather than morals and encouraged people to shout down and even turn in their neighbors and family who dissent. We are certainly seeing all of those actions in this moment. This is one of the biggest power grabs by the billionaires of the world and it's up to each of us whether we want to stand by, help them oppress mankind or resist.

You may have noticed I've used a wide variety of news sources in this article, I've done so purposefully as to remove bias inhernent in any single news source. I regularly read very few of these news sites, but I recognize many people have faith in them. I tend to get my news from news aggregators in podcasts- they bring awareness of a topic and I can do my own research to verify. Channels that still offer a viewpoint different than the prevailing propaganda I consume are:

Computing Forever - Dave is in Ireland, but covers many issues in the US and the rest of the world.
Tim Pool - Tim has started his own media company after working for several others. He was one of the only journalists who was on the ground in Occupy Wallstreet and Ferguson as well as world wide conflicts. He can be verbose and hyperbolic but he covers stories I don't see being covered elsewhere.
The Dollar Vigilante - Jeff Berwick started off as a financial advisor and has branched into how financial systems enslave most for the benefit of the very few. He's also the host of the Anarchast. He can be a little goofy at times, but topics he was talking about 5 years ago are happening today, he has pretty good foresight.
Scanner (scnr) - A news company that is bringing back long form, in depth journalism.

Finally, I want to finish with that video I mentioned at the very beginning. It's certainly more entertaining than me and hits many of my points. You can view that here.

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great 2021!